My small disaster
Something mysterious and bad just happened on my PowerBook.
Basically, it looks like a lot of my application preferences have gone missing. Most applications are acting like I have never opened them before. Daily workhorse applications like BBedit and Transmit are welcoming me as a newbie. My dock looks way too clean, and iTunes and iPhoto don’t seem to know anything about my 30GB of MP3s and photos. Worst of all, Mail can’t find any of the 900 or so emails that were languishing in my InBox.
It’s almost (but not quite) as if the contents of ~/Library/Preferences were deleted.
Has anyone else experienced something like this? I’m trying to think what might have been the culprit, and the only 3 things that spring to mind are:
- My PowerBook got a nasty bump a few hours earlier
- I had just finished downloading approx. 9,000 spam emails from an unused email account belonging to one of my clients (don’t ask!)
- I have the ‘flu, and somehow this made me stupid enough to delete lots of emails and plist files.
Oh well, most of what I lost was backed up, but there is a chance that some recent emails got lost. So, if you’ve emailed me recently and I haven’t replied yet, please try again. It may be that I lost the email you sent me.
Update: I was wrong about iTunes and iPhoto not being able to find media files. The media files were actually gone! So far as I can tell, nothing is missing from my documents folder and all my applications are OK. What could cause such a specific pattern of data loss? It almost feels like a virus. Thankfully I had used a demo copy of Super Duper a few weeks ago to do a complete backup. I’ll be upgrading to a registered version now!
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:51 pm
The only thing that I can think of that could nuke some preferences and your media files at the same time, is a failing hard drive, so I’d work on the assumption it’ll happen again.
My most comforting backup strategy is to sync with a bootable clone of my hard drive every day at 4am. That way if something goes TU, I can just pop in the clone disk and carry on from where I was yesterday.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:52 pm
That Powerbook bump could have sent the HDD heads skittering across the disk platter, erasing stuff from your file allocation table.
April 4th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
Yeah, I’m trying to be more hard core about backing up but it’s hard when you’re living out of hotel rooms. Your theory about the bump sounds plausible, but the thing that disturbs me is that the list of files that went AWOL didn’t seem particularly random - it was like someone who hates me sat down at my laptop for an hour deleting all the stuff I really need!